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So consider your hydroxychloroquine example again this way; Nobody has ever searched for hydroxychloroquine before today. Today is the day the word is hypothet

So consider your hydroxychloroquine example again this way; Nobody has ever searched for hydroxychloroquine before today. Today is the day the word is hypothetically invented. Today 2 million people will search for hydroxychloroquine. But only one of them was the first to do it. What I know about pop-culture and viral internet culture is telling me that 15% of 1 trillion searches being unique is shady math. So I am not fully convinced that the 15% claim is completely transparent.

no_way 6y ago
It's a guess, but my thinking is that previously most people who searched term hydroxychloroquine were mainly scientists and other people related to that not your general population. Suddenly covid happens and now large numbers of people learn about this new drug they never heard before, they are gonna search, and I presume this, most wildly different things like: "how does it work?" "does it cause some disease?" "insert something political here about hydroxychloroquine" "did aliens make hydroxychloroquine?" and many more things I lack imagination to come up with and that's only about hydroxychloroquine. I doubt 15% number is about single word cases, but more about combination of words and that seems reasonable. Inventing new words daily seems unlikely, chaining them on the other hand seems plausible.
nostrademons 6y ago
The vast majority of people don't search for [hydroxychloroquine]. They search for [Is hydroxychloroquine effective in treating COVID-19?] or [What is the first drug that was approved to treat COVID-19?] or [What methods do we currently have to treat COVID-19?]. You can see these on the search results page as the "Common questions related to..." widget. How else do you think Google gets that data? The folks who use keyword-based searches are largely those who got on the Internet before ~2007. Tech-savvy, relatively well-off, usually Millenial or Gen-X, plugged into trends. This happens to be the demographic dominant at Hacker News. But there's a much larger demographic who just types in whatever they're thinking of, in natural language, and expects to get answers. Come to think of it, this is also the demographic that doesn't use tabbed browsing, and uses whichever browser ships with their OEM, and often doesn't realize that there's a separate program called a "browser" running when they click on the "Internet", and issues a Google Search for [google] (#3 query in 2010) when they want to get to Google even though they're on Google already but don't realize it, and doesn't know what a URL is. When a big-tech company makes a brain-dead usability decision you don't like, first consider how that usability choice might appear to your grandmother and it might not seem so brain-dead.

no_way 6y ago

It's a guess, but my thinking is that previously most people who searched term hydroxychloroquine were mainly scientists and other people related to that not your general population. Suddenly covid happens and now large numbers of people learn about this new drug they never heard before, they are gonna search, and I presume this, most wildly different things like: "how does it work?" "does it cause some disease?" "insert something political here about hydroxychloroquine" "did aliens make hydroxychloroquine?" and many more things I lack imagination to come up with and that's only about hydroxychloroquine. I doubt 15% number is about single word cases, but more about combination of words and that seems reasonable. Inventing new words daily seems unlikely, chaining them on the other hand seems plausible.

nostrademons 6y ago

The vast majority of people don't search for [hydroxychloroquine]. They search for [Is hydroxychloroquine effective in treating COVID-19?] or [What is the first drug that was approved to treat COVID-19?] or [What methods do we currently have to treat COVID-19?]. You can see these on the search results page as the "Common questions related to..." widget. How else do you think Google gets that data? The folks who use keyword-based searches are largely those who got on the Internet before ~2007. Tech-savvy, relatively well-off, usually Millenial or Gen-X, plugged into trends. This happens to be the demographic dominant at Hacker News. But there's a much larger demographic who just types in whatever they're thinking of, in natural language, and expects to get answers. Come to think of it, this is also the demographic that doesn't use tabbed browsing, and uses whichever browser ships with their OEM, and often doesn't realize that there's a separate program called a "browser" running when they click on the "Internet", and issues a Google Search for [google] (#3 query in 2010) when they want to get to Google even though they're on Google already but don't realize it, and doesn't know what a URL is. When a big-tech company makes a brain-dead usability decision you don't like, first consider how that usability choice might appear to your grandmother and it might not seem so brain-dead.